How a precocious poet came to glamorize war, glory and death.

By

Micah Mattix

Aug. 23, 2013 2:41 p.m. ET

In 1910, at age 47, Gabriele d'Annunzio—Italy's greatest living poet, as he liked to be billed—fled Florence for Paris to escape his creditors. Short, balding, with small black and yellow teeth and bulging eyes that to one observer made him look like a "tragic gargoyle," d'Annunzio had an uncanny charm, which he used to seduce hundreds of women. "The woman who had not slept with him," the expatriate American heiress Natalie Barney recalled, "became a laughing-stock." He was also a powerful speaker who could captivate entire crowds. In Italy, d'Annunzio had the aura of a mythical figure....